A Measure of Research Taste

TL;DR

The paper introduces CAP, a citation-based metric that evaluates researchers based on both impact and productivity, aiming to promote impactful scientific contributions rather than mere publication volume.

Contribution

The paper presents CAP, a simple, interpretable, and parameter-free measure that balances publication impact and quantity, addressing limitations of existing citation metrics.

Findings

CAP correlates with researcher impact across multiple disciplines.

CAP produces plausible and consistent rankings of researchers.

The measure is scalable and applicable to large publication datasets.

Abstract

Researchers are often evaluated by citation-based metrics. Such metrics can inform hiring, promotion, and funding decisions. Concerns have been expressed that popular citation-based metrics incentivize researchers to maximize the production of publications. Such incentives may not be optimal for scientific progress. Here we present a citation-based measure that rewards both productivity and taste: the researcher's ability to focus on impactful contributions. The presented measure, CAP, balances the impact of publications and their quantity, thus incentivizing researchers to consider whether a publication is a useful addition to the literature. CAP is simple, interpretable, and parameter-free. We analyze the characteristics of CAP for highly-cited researchers in biology, computer science, economics, and physics, using a corpus of millions of publications and hundreds of millions of citations with yearly temporal granularity. CAP produces qualitatively plausible outcomes and has a number of advantages over prior metrics. Results can be explored at https://cap-measure.org/